This series opener starring a Navy sleuth makes a big splash.
A 20-year naval veteran may not see a 21st after his commanding officer orders him to conduct an off-the-books murder investigation in this novel.
There are times when a man’s entire career is on the line, times where one critical mistake can cost him everything he has worked for. For CPO Sim Greene, finding out who killed retired naval Lt. Barry St. James is one of those times. Greene, who lives aboard his boat, the Figaro, found the submerged, tortured body himself. The victim was a shipmate and friend of his CO, who, despite the fact that the Navy doesn’t have jurisdiction, orders Greene to find out who killed him and to retrieve sensitive documents that could embarrass the Navy. If Greene is successful, his application for the chief warrant officer program and promotion to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service are assured. If he is not, he’ll go “from Chief Petty Officer to E-Nothin’ in no time at all.” Greene doesn’t have much to go on: no witnesses, no angry family members, no obvious, identifiable suspects. But he’s a sailor who gets things done with the help of his boat dock neighbor Al Higgins, a former Navy SEAL–turned–Ph.D. Greene is described as someone who doesn’t have the greatest appreciation for accepted military procedure and can be difficult to deal with, but Avery doesn’t sink him with hard-boiled clichés. In this series starter, Greene is tough yet appealingly vulnerable (“The vision of a drowned man looking at me in horror from the other side of death kept me awake for some time”). The missing-documents subplot doesn’t hold water next to the compelling murder mystery, but the book is buoyed by memorable turns of phrase, such as “Nothing dies of old age in the sea.”
This series opener starring a Navy sleuth makes a big splash.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-945809-01-9
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Jack Tar Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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